Hello, welcome back to Brussels. This MLEX podcast is indeed coming to you from our Brussels Bureau. I'm James Panicki, Mlex's Brussels managing editor, and I'm sitting in a rather austere conference room with Laurel Henning, our senior energy correspondent. Hello again, Laurel.

Hi, James.

Now, you spent a frustrating day on Monday waiting for the end of a ministerial meeting to decide on new energy savings

rules to apply to the EU after 2020, but it was worth the wait because by 1829 local time,

your story hit the MLEX wire. Before we get started, in a nutshell, what exactly were energy

ministers meeting in Brussels to discuss, and why now?

So there were a number of dossiers on the agenda for Monday's meeting.

There was the energy efficiency laws, which we'll discuss here now.

There was also energy efficiency for buildings and some progress reports just reporting back on the overall clean energy package

proposal which we've also discussed before in our podcasts. So it was sort of a taking stock

meeting but also an end of term for the Maltese presidency which were taking on the six

month rotating council presidency that we have in Brussels. The end of their term, the end of the first

half of this year, they were very keen to wrap up a couple of legislative files, and that's where

the energy efficiency debate falls. And for those unfamiliar with the EU process, they were not

legislating, they were simply reaching a common position on the part of all 28 member national governments of the

member states and then that is going to be their position moving forward into a legislative process

which will also involve the European Parliament. Exactly. They were discussing on Monday

laws that were put forward or changes to laws proposed by the European Commission

in November of last year. They have to come up with a common approach and so does the European

Parliament in its own time and then the two institutions, the Parliament and the Council,

then discussed together and what they agree as their sort of agreement deal, that is what will end up becoming law.

And the meeting obviously went longer than expected.

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